• Published 28th Aug 2016
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In the Company of Night - Mitch H



The Black Company claims to not remember Nightmare Moon, but they fly her banner under alien skies far from Equestria. And the stars are moving slowly towards their prophesied alignment...

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Driven From Pillar To Post

SBMS026

Operations settled into a cautious routine over the next week. With the Captain out of commission, the Lieutenant was handling the affairs of the Company, and she wasn't as steady a hoof on the reins as the old bird had been, even if the places he had been guiding us into had been getting more and more hair-raising. We settled into a pattern of reaction as the enemy stumbled blindly back into the central districts. By this point they had lost a significant number of ponies, not enough to seriously affect their operational capacity, but enough to hurt. No army can suffer the sort of losses we'd inflicted without anything to show for it, and not take a hit to their unit cohesion and morale. They did the obvious, and started re-building their granaries, and sent out detachments to tear down our “scarecrows”.

This had been expected; it was, in point of fact, a secondary purpose for their deployment in the first place. Yes, the primary reason for setting out gorey, grotesque fetishes throughout the province was to terrorize and alarm the population, and also to make a claim over the territory. But it was also a challenge to the rebel, to the rebel's authority over its own territory and claim of sovereignty within the province. This was a vital aspect of our war on the rebel's legitimacy. By destroying their excise posts, we denied their authority to levy taxation and control trade. By posting the province with the dismembered remains of their butchered soldiers, we advertised their inability to assert the monopoly of violence in their claimed domain.

Of course they had to tear down the scarecrows.

They still hadn't learned to watch for pegasi and griffin observation posts. Tickle Me had left multiple OPs over the marked crossroads and their approaches, and those observation ponies were supplied with replacement fetishes - built from the spoils of the battle on the road to Benoit - to be emplaced as soon as the first sets were ripped down by the offended caribou. No need to rush over the first hurdles, at this point it was an endurance race, not a sprint.

When the second round of detachments came around to tear down the scarecrows, the OPs had been reinforced by pegasi eager to demonstrate the tactical utility of their scarecrow-emplanting stunts. The caribou who approached the crossroads scarecrows to tear them down again, didn't even hear the dive-bombing maniacs plummeting to those caribou's dooms. At most of the crossroads-skirmishes, they didn't actually hit their targets with those heavy flying stakes, but the ones that they did – those caribou splashed like burst melons struck with ballistae bolts. A pegasus hurtling from tens of thousands of feet above carrying their weight again in sharpened, fired-hardened wooden stake makes for one Tartarus of a discarding sabot. As I've written elsewhere, the tactic is usually employed against heavy fortifications and close-packed formations, not individual caribou. It's quite literally like using a forge-hammer to flatten a fly.

The fact that the first scarecrow-dismantling detachments had been unmolested left the second wave of detachments under-ponied and sloppy. They weren't prepared to be attacked, and it told in the fighting. None of the rebel detachments were wiped out, but all of them were routed, and by and large they did very little to harm or even threaten their attackers. Pegasi aren't the heavy-hitters you'll find among the ground troops, and their combat skills outside their milieu can be somewhat limited due to their hollow-boned insubstantiality, but they're experts without peer when it comes to harrying a routed foe from the field. Death by a thousand cuts, creating and maintaining panic – their targets have been known to just drop dead from shock and terror after being chased for miles by wing-bladed speeding death from above.

But the crossroad-skirmishes gave away one of our advantages, decisively. The enemy had gotten a good look at us for the first time. Or, I should write, some of them that survived saw us straight for the first time. We weren't shadows and boogeymares in the darkness any more to those that ran and told the tale, we were flesh and blood and feather and steel. They had fought us in daylight, and lost, but daylight strips the Company of some of its mystique. I was remorseful when I took the accounts of the fighting from the pegasi I interviewed. We lost no ponies in the crossroad-fights, and I barely had any work to speak of – a few stitched cuts, one mare who pulled a wing-muscle while missing her target with her stake-spindle.

As we fought with the White Rose over our scarecrows, the good ponies of the province poured into the fields and threshing-yards. The harvest was in full swing, and scythes and sickles reaped the rewards of a long, troubled summer. The weather had been perfect, and the fields were heavy with grain. I'm not a farm-pony, being a zebra who grew up with cobblestones under my hooves throughout my childhood, so you'll have to go elsewhere for long paeans to the farmers and their harvesting practices and so forth. All I know is that they were out there, sunrise to sunset, and long after sunset in the threshing-yards and barns, and those barns began to bulge with their grain.

Because we had thoroughly disrupted the normal delivery patterns. In a normal year, they would have had carts running from all the major farms to their respective community's mills. There would have been a conveyer belt of sorts, of carts running threshed grain from the barns to the mills, and flour from the mills and hay from the barns to the granaries. Well, we had burned the granaries, and terrorized at least some of the mills out of operation, and we stole the carts. Not all of the carts, but enough to create shortages, and to expose the ones still in operation by their rarity on the roads. This opened up a new angle of attack.

A few mills were still operating, some of them manned by rebel soldiers ineptly grinding their own meal, some of them put back into operation by the mourning relatives of those millers we had hung from their own hoists. They were too heavily posted by protective details to be worth the ponypower investment, but it did mean that the routes leading up to those isolated operational mills were predictable, and vulnerable.

The Lieutenant sent out detachments to forward posts in the darkness, so that they were in position to ambush the loaded carts before they ever got close to their mills. The carters were beaten, and their carts burnt with their cargoes. If the enemy platoons defending the mills sallied forth to investigate the pillars of smoke, they were ambushed by waiting Company brethren in defilade. So much easier on the troops than assaulting the caribou in their fortified positions!

We conducted a dozen of these actions during the later course of the harvest, and ran the rebel ragged. In two of these otherwise-not-notable engagements, we lost ponies. A jack named Small Numbers caught an unlucky cut across his left femoral artery in a tussle with an armed carter on the road to the mill outside Marinette a week before the end of the harvest in that district. In a blown ambush outside Brazeau, a unicorn corporal - a mare named Greensward - and a jack who went by the Company name Hookbill were caught out of cover and cut down by a caribou reaction force that grossly outnumbered their brothers on the field. A team of griffins with pegasi-unicorn charioteer supports were able to recover the bodies in a dare-devil strike against the mill in Brazeau which the enemy had taken their bodies to be displayed. One of those griffins, Guelph Josef, died of wounds taken in that night-time assault. The mill burned.

Fewer and fewer civilian cart-ponies were willing to haul grain in these conditions, and the mills ground to an unproductive halt, their supplies dried up, and without grist. Eventually, the caribou started hauling their own carts, and got some small amount of grain out of nearby farms, marching their carts in heavily defended convoy to the mills. I'm told that the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil, in a rare sally into the field for that latter unicorn, eyed the convoys from concealed observation posts, and decided to not give the enemy the fight they were spoiling for.

Instead, they set up the grandest ambush of the campaign on the road from the largest operational mill to the new, heavily defended granary in construction next to the main rebel base, outside Lau Crosse. The caribou had posted the whole of the route with guards, but not so heavily that they were actually in line of sight of each other. They should have been more paranoid. It was too easy to overwhelm the posted guards in isolation, and roll them up one pair at a time. You could barely tell that the caribou standing their posts were literally posted once Otonashi was done with her glamours. The flour-convoy later that day rolled past several pairs of stiffly saluting guards, and as far as we could tell, none twigged to the deceased status of their road-guards.

So they were not in the least prepared when just after the platoons of the vanguard had passed over it, a stretch of roadbed disappeared below the leading cart-caribou, plunging her, her harness-partner, and their overloaded cart into a pitfall dug quickly by earth ponies and maintained against collapse by sheer witchcraft , the type of main-force magic that overstrains our sort of warlock. It was the work of Shorthorn, and it blew his strength for the event. We were lucky he didn't end up in the infirmary like Octavius, but he held that shell of earth under the hooves of dozens of marching enemy soldiers until they had passed and he could let it collapse under the carters.

The disappearance of one of their carts caused the entire convoy to pile up behind the blockage. Some of the soldier-carters at the new head of the convoy tried to drive off the roadbed and run around the pitfall, only to discover that it extended in a wide semi-circle around the road on both sides, and two of them lost their carts to the trap. It was now chaos, and some of the carters started cutting their own traces, looking to free themselves for the inevitable fight.

This was the point when Tickle Me's contribution to the ambush fell out of the clouds at terminal velocity, their fuses flaring behind them. More heavy stake-spindles, with casks mounted upon their blunted heads. The casks impacted dully atop their targeted cart-loads, the heavy stakes continuing to drive onwards as the casks themselves suddenly stopped, and the resulting overpressure burst the casks and their loads of distilled alcohol all over the flour-sacks and nearby roadbed. The arrested momentum was distributed at last to the fuses attached to the rear of the spindles, and their flaming shards fell upon the alcohol-soaked sacks, setting the whole ablaze. Their pony delivery systems arced out across the stubbled fields surrounding the now-deranged convoy, some buried, some burning, all in disorder.

This was when the unicorn bow-ponies started flinging arrows at the convoy from glamoured cover. They could take their time, and they had plenty of spare bolts, and they swept the convoy from stem to stern and back again before they provoked the caribou vanguard and rear-guard into charging through the open fields on both sides of the ambush, trying to flush out the hidden snipers, and catching their own share of Tartarus in the process. The caribou shook out into loose formation to cover the most ground, they must have concluded we were waging a hit-and-run attack, since all they had seen were stand-off strikes. So they were utterly out of position when the warlocks dropped the glamours on the right side of the road and revealed a Company phalanx on the open flanks of the vanguard. Donkey, earth pony, and zebra lancers tore through the scattered open ranks of the caribou vanguard, and obliterated them. There were no survivors.

Our phalanx opened up after trampling the remnants of their vanguard, and turned to sweep the carter-caribou and the rearguard from the field. They fell back in relatively good order, peppered every step of the way by arrows from our unicorns, and the survivors made it to a nearby farmstead, where we besieged them, setting various buildings on fire, and driving them into a desperate defensive position. The abandoned carts on the road, of course, were burnt in their traces.

The Lieutenant could have ordered the charge and exterminated the rebel, but word had arrived from the scouts that there were reaction forces arriving from both ends of the road, both from the mill and the base next to the granary. She called it a day, and the Company withdrew in perfect order, marching away on a side-road, and leaving the rebel reinforcements to extract their traumatized survivors from the hastily-fortified remnants of a half-burned barn.

It had been a perfect fight, which is to say, deeply, grotesquely unfair. Only a damn fool offers a fair fight. I close this account of the ambush on the crossroad outside Lau Crosse, glad to say that no ponies entered the Annals that day, and only five wounds were serious enough to be aerially evacuated to my surgery.

And to note that the regiments in and around Lau Crosse would have a hungry autumn, and a hungrier winter. The roads south from Rennet started to see a trickle of caribou deserters slink by in search of better-fed employment.

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